


two minutes for diving

by inlovewithnight



Category: Hockey RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Always a Different Sex, F/M, Oral Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-04
Updated: 2016-06-04
Packaged: 2018-07-12 03:18:26
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,902
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7083031
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inlovewithnight/pseuds/inlovewithnight
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kris snorts and tosses her glass aside, letting it roll across the carpet until it bumps into the wall. “You want to help me relax and let go? What exactly do you have in mind for that, eh?”</p><p>“What do you need?”</p>
            </blockquote>





	two minutes for diving

Kris doesn’t mean to be bad. She really doesn’t. She wants to be good for the team, she wants to help them win. She doesn’t mean to lose her temper.

It just _happens_.

She’s sitting in the locker room after everyone else has left, re-taping a stick that doesn’t need it. Dana’s going to come take it away from her soon. The equipment staff needs to clean up, the arena staff needs to get started on closing up the building, other people have things to do and she is slowing them down.

She doesn’t _mean_ to. It’s just happening, because her head is too noisy right now for her to drive. She’d plow into a wall just trying to get out of the garage.

 _Tabernac_. 

Her hands are steady while she winds the tape, so that’s good, at least. Her head will calm down soon, at least enough to drive home. When she gets there, if she can’t sleep, she has booze to get her there, and pills to pour on top if that doesn’t work either. She is a finely-tuned hockey playing machine, with finely-tuned chemistry to grease her gears. 

_Fuck_.

She comes to the end of the tape and frowns at it, then lets the stick drop to the floor. Dana will get it. Or someone else. It doesn’t matter.

She is… she is tired. Twenty-eight minutes of ice time. Four minutes of penalties. She didn’t _mean_ to, she just—

She takes a deep breath and stands up, willing herself to take one step at a time. Away from the stall, toward the door. When she gets there, she’ll make the first right, and walk to the garage, take her keys from her bag—

She forgot her bag. She goes back to the stall, takes it, begins again. Away from the stall, toward the door…

“Letang.”

She’s too tired even to have a startle reflex. Sullivan is standing in the doorway, watching her with an expression she can’t read. Too tired for that, either. 

“What?” she asks after a moment, when they’ve both stood and stared at each other in silence. “Aren’t you going home?”

“I was on my way.” He’s holding his keys, she realizes belatedly, tapping them against his thigh in an uneven rhythm. “You?”

“Just about to go.”

“Hmm.” He’s still staring at her, and Kris doesn’t flinch under a coach’s scrutiny—hasn’t since she was in juniors—but if she ever does again, it’ll be because of him, his cold evaluating eyes. They’re like a snake’s, maybe, or a crocodile’s, when he’s being critical. 

“Come with me,” he says abruptly, stepping back and holding the door open for her.

“Come with you where?” She falls into step with him, not obediently but because that was the direction she was going anyway. 

He looks at her out of the corner of his eye, not breaking stride, still considering and predatory. Kris isn’t afraid. She has never been prey. She fights back.

“Your place,” he says after a moment, making a sharp turn down the hallway to the garage. “I’ll drive, though. You can barely walk a straight line, you shouldn’t be behind the wheel.”

“I’m fine.”

“You’ve had a hundred concussions, a stroke, and half a game of ice time.”

Kris shakes her head. “Twenty-eight minutes.”

“Of course you don’t dispute the concussions.”

“Eh.” She shrugs and puts on a burst of speed to get to the door into the garage before him. “Allow me.”

He rolls his eyes and walks across the garage to the head coach’s reserved spot. He came up from Wilkes-Barre driving a pickup with more than a few miles on it; she smirks to see that he’s now in a Mercedes. Of course. “Nice.”

Sullivan actually cracks a smile at that, and his ears go red. A victory for her. “Gotta look the part, you know?”

“All I said was that it’s nice.”

“Your tone spoke volumes.” He opens the driver’s door and nods at her. “Get in.”

Kris doesn’t know why she’s doing this. Agreeing and going along with things is not her usual style. Sure, this is her coach, but the game is over. She’s off the clock.

“You want to talk to me about something?” She gets in the car and shoves her bag down between her feet. “Might as well start now.”

He starts the car and navigates out of the garage before he answers her, even pauses to wave to the security guard. She knows, she _knows_ that he’s making her wait, like a child, he’s putting her in her place. Normally that would make her furious enough to jump out of the moving car and find her own way home. But tonight she’s too tired, and anyway—it’s Sullivan. He hasn’t fucked up with them yet. He gets a little bit of leeway. For what he’s done for Sidney, if nothing else.

“You know that you’re too valuable to risk yourself like that,” he says finally, when they’re out on the road.

Kris shrugs and stares out at the streetlights as they pass. “It’s part of the game.”

“Do not bullshit me. Please. Do me that much of a favor.”

“It’s part of _my_ game.” It is. It always has been. She’s not a pretty show-pony forward. She plays _defense_. She uses her body.

“You have to play smarter.” He stops for a red light and looks at her. “You are completely tuning me out, aren’t you? You’ve heard this all before.”

“Coaches talk a lot.”

He laughs out loud at that, and she lets herself smile. It’s _true_. Coaches love to hear themselves talk above anything else.

As if he can read her thoughts and wants to prove her wrong, Sullivan is silent the rest of the drive. He pulls up close to the house and kills the engine, sitting still for a moment before he looks at her. “Can I come in?”

She’s bent forward, digging in her bag for her keys. “More talking?”

“I was hoping for a drink.”

She eyes him for a moment, then nods. “That can happen. Come on.”

When she punches her code into the alarm box, the lights on the first floor come on. Sullivan makes an appreciative noise, and she has to laugh. “Geno got it at his house, because he’s a lazy fuck, and then we all wanted it.” 

“It’s useful.” He follows her into the foyer, slipping his shoes off without prompting and leaving his jacket on the coat rack inside the door. She tosses her bag aside and heads for the kitchen. Her good alcohol is in the bar downstairs, but the day to day stuff lives where she can get to it easily.

Sullivan leans against the counter, watching her find glasses and choose a bottle of whiskey. “You drink with ice or without?” he asks.

“Neat.” She doesn’t ask for his preference, just pours both alike and hands him his with a challenging look. “Santé.”

He takes a drink and sighs softly. “Can we sit?”

“Why?”

“To talk.” He holds his free hand up. “I’m not here to argue or fight. I promise. I just want to talk to you.”

She shifts her weight, looking down into her glass. “About the game.”

“Not just tonight. A bigger picture.”

She hates to give in, but she’s tired. “Fine.” She leads him to the den, her glass in one hand and the bottle in the other. If they’re talking bigger picture, she’s going to need it, even if he truly doesn’t want to argue.

He sits on the couch and rests one leg across the opposite knee. She’s distracted by his socks; they’re purple, with a line of little ducks on them. Not what she would have expected.

“Kris,” he says. “Earth to Kris.”

“Cute socks.”

“Thank you.” He takes another drink. “You’re too good to play like that. Too valuable to the team.”

“I’m valuable _because_ I play like that.”

“You’ve valuable because you’re fast and you’re strong. You have a good shot and a hell of a hockey mind. You see the whole pattern.”

“That’s Sid, not me.”

“Ideally it’s the whole team.” He smiles slightly and takes the bottle from her to top up his glass. “We’ll keep working on it.”

She looks down at her glass, swirling what’s left of her whiskey before downing it all. “Is that everything you came over here to tell me?”

“Are you kicking me out?”

“No.” She takes the bottle back and refills her glass, higher than before. Fuck it. She has a right to get drunk in her own home. “Just wondering.”

“I know you have a hard time letting go of rough games.”

There’s whiskey splashed up on the lip of her glass; she licks it clean and shrugs. “I’ll skate it off tomorrow.”

“There are other ways to let things go besides skating them off. You’re allowed to rest your body occasionally, you know.”

“Are you speaking as the head coach, or as some guy sitting on my couch, drinking my alcohol?”

He smirks and gestures with his free hand. He has good hands, she’s thought to herself when zoning out of a locker-room speech or seven. Broad, strong, fucked up here and there from years of handling a stick. She couldn’t trust a coach who didn’t have a player’s hands. “Why not both?”

“I don’t think it works like that. You have to pick one.”

He finishes his drink and sets the glass aside, then leans toward her, folding his hands over his knees. “Then I’ll be some guy, but one who’s watched you as a coach. Does that work?”

Kris has no idea where this is going, but the whiskey has taken the tension out of her and he’s managed to keep this strange conversation intriguing. “I suppose.” 

“You’re an incredible athlete. An amazing performer on the ice. You get the job done, every time, and I respect that.”

She tilts her glass toward him. “But?”

“You’ve got to learn to relax and let go.”

“Or what?”

The first flicker of annoyance crosses his face. He’s held out longer than she thought he would. She knows exactly how annoying she can be, how good she is at pushing buttons. She’s been told many times that she doesn’t know when to stop, always in a tone that says the person saying it would be more than willing to teach her through physical force if necessary.

He doesn’t snap, though; he takes a breath and settles back on the couch, stretching his legs out a bit. That lets the cuffs of his trousers ride down enough to hide the ducks. “I’m not a psychic. But I feel like if you don’t, you’re eventually going to explode.”

Her brow furrows in confusion; she can feel it, and tries to hide it by finishing her drink, tucking her chin so her hair can fall forward over her face. “Literally or figuratively?”

“Could go either way.” He marks off the options on his fingers. “You might do something on the ice that the league can’t overlook. You might burn out and just not be able to bring the level of play anymore. You might get careless and injure yourself. It might all just build up in your blood pressure until you have another stroke.”

She can’t breathe quite right, and at some point the bottle moved out of her reach. He must’ve moved it, but she didn’t notice where. “That’s not what caused the stroke.”

“I’m not a doctor, either. These are just the kinds of things I’ve been thinking about. Worrying about.”

“You don’t have to worry about me.”

“As your coach? Or as some guy sitting here?”

“Both.”

“As your coach I absolutely have to worry about you. As some guy…” He leans forward again, his eyes so damn intent. “I just want to help.”

Kris snorts and tosses her glass aside, letting it roll across the carpet until it bumps into the wall. “You want to help me relax and let go? What exactly do you have in mind for that, eh?”

“What do you need?”

Kris sneers at him. “Maybe I need someone to eat my cunt for an hour. What are you going to do about that?”

He doesn’t even blink. She should have expected that; he never blinks. Never flinches. Absolutely a reptile, cold-blooded all the way through, except when he loses his temper and goes up in heat.

“I said I want to help.” He meets her eyes, his gaze so direct it sends a pulse down her spine like an electric shock. “If that’s what you need, then I’m game.”

She laughs out loud, unable to stop herself. “You think I’m going to back down and say I was just kidding?”

The corner of his mouth twitches. “I’ve met you, Letang. You never back down from anything.”

She keeps her eyes on his as she gets to her feet, undoes the fly on her trousers, and pushes them down off her hips. Her boy-cut briefs go next, kicked aside with the trousers and leaving her standing in her button-down and socks. 

Sullivan breaks eye contact first, looking down her body slowly and then back up again. Nothing he hasn’t seen in the locker room, she knows that, but he’s _studying_ her now, his mouth moving into a thoughtful twist.

“Well?” she says, putting as much challenge in her voice as she can. She _won’t_ back down. Not for anything.

He stands and unbuttons the cuffs of his shirt, one at a time, rolling them up his forearms precisely. He loosens his tie next, freeing the top button at his collar as well, then crosses the room to stand in front of her. The official stats say he has two inches on her, and standing like this she believes it. She could punch him pretty solidly in the gut right here, if she wanted to. 

Instead she smirks and raises her eyebrows. “What are you waiting for, an invitation? I haven’t got all night.”

She expects him to answer back, to keep sparring with her, but instead he just twists his mouth again and gets to his knees. 

Occasionally it occurs to Kris that she does, in fact, tend to rush ahead at full speed and not think about the consequences until a whistle is blowing in her face and she’s off to the sin bin. Her two minutes (or four, or five) are her time to reflect on what, exactly, she should have been thinking about in the first place, if she had been willing to think at all. Most of the time, maybe seventy or eighty percent, she concludes that she would’ve done the exact same thing regardless.

There’s no whistle here, and no penalty box, but when Sullivan rests his hands on her thighs and runs his thumbs in slow arcs over the soft skin on their inner flanks, she goes through her reflection process at rapid speed. 

He digs his thumbs in against the muscle, just a bit, enough to cue her to open her stance and spread her legs apart. When he looks up at her, the hem of her button-down hides the lower half of his face, his eyes startling and clear above it.

Yeah, she would have done the same thing in any case. No regrets.

“It might be easier for both of us if you sit down,” he says.

“It might be better for me if you stopped talking.” It’s an automatic retort, pure instinct, and she’s sitting down even as she says it. He pushes her knees apart enough to fit between them, folds her shirt up under itself to tuck it out of the way, and leans in to breathe against the dark twist of curls between her thighs.

She wants to wrap her legs around him, but she can’t decide where—his waist, his shoulders, his neck—so she stays still, digging her teeth into her lip and looking down at him. He’s taking his time, smelling her, teasing her labia with the tips of his fingers where the close-trimmed hair is gathering damp and sticky.

“You’re so slow.” Her voice is already thick and rough despite herself. “Do it already.”

“Be patient.”

“I thought you were going to help me relax, not annoy me even more. Or are you—”

She cuts off as he slides his hand down and pushes his thumb against her, then inside her, slow and patient, spreading slick fluid over delicate skin. He’s not looking up at her, but watching himself touch her, his forehead furrowed just a bit as he opens her up.

“It’s just a cunt,” she says, trying to summon up the right level of aggression, but all she can manage is hunger. “You’ve seen them before, I think.”

“Hush.” It’s the closest he’s come to sounding stern with her since they left the arena, and her first instinct is to fight him. She never just gives in, not to anyone, not for anything. 

But then his mouth is against her, tongue chasing upward from her entrance to her clit in a long, slow lick that knocks all of her thoughts aside.

She slouches back in the chair, gripping the left arm tightly and dragging her right hand through her hair, holding it back off her face so she can watch Sullivan’s mouth on her. She loves watching her partners do this, anyone, any time, the visuals sending little jolts through her as surely as the wet sounds and low moans. The feel of it, of course, that’s something different, stronger, tightening her stomach muscles and heating her from her core. 

He takes his time, licking the slick pink skin until Kris is dripping and every nerve is sensitized. “Fuck,” she mutters, squirming in her seat, giving in to her earlier impulse to wrap her legs around his waist. He leans into the hold just a little, enough that the tension is holding him still instead of pulling him closer. He isn’t someone who just gives way, either. She should have known.

Two fingers slide against her, then inside, slow and patient. His mouth moves up to her clit before she’s processed the gentle stretch, and she moans as he sucks at the bit of flesh, his tongue working roughly against it.

“More.” She reaches out on impulse, dragging her fingers through his hair and pushing him down harder. “Don’t tease me.”

He pulls back enough to nuzzle at the tangled curls crowning her labia and looks up at her, licking his lips clean. “You said you needed an hour. We’ve got a ways to go yet.”

“You’re a dick, you know?”

He shakes his head and slides his arms under her thighs, boosting them up to his shoulders instead. She’s tempted to kick him just on general principle, but then he puts his mouth to her again and oh, yes, the angle is much better. He can get deeper this way, taste more of her. It feels like he’s trying to push completely inside her, become part of her, and that thought makes her bite her lip and squirm in her seat, riding down against him.

“Who’s in charge here?” he asks, turning his head to bite the inside of her thigh. It stings, sharp and bright behind her eyes, and she arches up off the chair. He slides his hands under her ass, palming the curves of it and pinching lightly on one side.

“Dangerous question,” she gasps, twisting toward the pain, leaning into it to try to get those sparks in her head again. “Don’t want to have to fight me for it, do you?”

He looks at her again, smiling slightly, and she finds she can’t quite look away from his eyes. She doesn’t believe in hypnosis, but his eyes are… well, they hold her attention.

“I didn’t come here to fight, Kris.” Then he bites her again, and her head goes all hot and bright. It’s almost enough to make her forget about fighting.

She reaches up under her shirt, fumbling the front clasp of her bra loose so she can get her hands on her tits, rubbing them roughly and dragging her nails over the soft skin enough to sting. The little bit of pain is good, it helps her focus, so she doesn’t get impatient or distracted and call him off again. 

He seems to realize that she’s done with being teased, because he doesn’t stop, just buries his face against her and eats her until she comes, cursing and bucking in his hands. It feels like she’ll have palm-shaped bruises on her ass from him holding her still. She wants to get to a mirror and check.

She pushes him back from her, keeping her hand on his forehead while she catches her breath. He sits back, as calm and expressionless as he is behind the bench, but his eyes are bright with smug satisfaction. 

His mouth and chin are wet and glistening with her, and as her eyes move over his face she realizes even more than that—his nose, his _eyelashes_ are sticky and spiky from how deep he was pressed against her. 

She laughs and rubs her thumb over his lips. “You’re a mess.”

He makes a vague sound of agreement and takes her thumb into his mouth, sucking lightly before letting go. “Still a ways out from an hour.”

“Mm.” She stretches her legs out, curling her toes and then relaxing each muscle one by one. “I played thirty minutes tonight. Might have to save the rest for another day.”

“Twenty-eight minutes,” he corrects dryly, and gets to his feet. “Restroom?”

She waves down the hall, on the assumption he’s clever enough to figure out which door, and indulges herself in another minute of stretching and enjoying the echoing pulse in her muscles. It _had_ been too long since she’d had sex. She’ll have to do better.

By the time he comes back, his face clean and his hair damp and ruffled from being towel-dried, she’s found her underwear and discarded shirt and bra entirely. “Let me know when you want to collect on the rest of the hour,” he says, leaning against the end of the couch and slipping his tie all the way free. He winds it around his hand and tucks it in his shirt pocket. “That’s not an invitation to get yourself more penalty minutes, by the way.”

“Part of my game.” She walks him to the front door, enjoying the cool air drying the sweat on her skin. Being topless at home is one of life’s small pleasures. “But I’ll think about it.”

“Thanks so much.” He steps into his shoes, giving her another glimpse of the ducks when he bends to tie them. 

“I’m going to buy you more socks,” she says. “Horses, maybe. Dogs. Spaceships.”

“What about penguins?”

“Too obvious for my taste.” She holds the door and watches him walk out to his car. The air is hushed and still, hovering between late night and early morning. She can hear him humming to himself as he sorts out his keys.

Tonight probably counts as doing something bad. Sid, for one, is going to be appalled when she tells him. But she’s not sorry. It’s just how she plays.


End file.
